Mark Leckey

Los Angeles,

at Hammer Museum

In the first room of Mark Leckey's exhibition at the Hammer Museumhangs a small poster that could easily be overlooked in favor of the videos, scintillating grids, LED screens and cardboard sculptures that glow, flicker and sing for our attention. Titled Circa '87 (2013), the image is a goofy guide of sorts to the more complex underpinnings of this new body of work. In it, Leckey is seated at a snare drum, sticks at the ready, wearing nothing but white shorts and a boyish grin while captivating a circle of beautiful women gathered together in a hair salon. He takes great pleasure in this audience, even though their enrapt attention has absolutely nothing to do with him. It's clear from first glance that the artist Photoshopped himself into a found image (from around 1987, one presumes); the model/actresses, even in the moment the photo was taken, were only ever performing desire for the camera. Leckey's puckish delight with his place among the beauties testifies to the fact that although these women cannot in fact admire him back, they can still fulfill his fantasy—at least on paper.

The 13 works in the exhibition, "On Pleasure Bent," are largely propelled by the British artist's long-standing practice of aggregation and assembly, of search and deploy—stringing found materials along new threads, uncovering the life forces of images, footage and objects to blur the boundaries of memory and reverie, artifact and fiction. The titular minute-long video is a teaser for Leckey's moving-image memoir of the same name (scheduled for completion next year). The memoir consists of what he calls "found memories," media that he believes formed him, shaped his desires and his sense of pleasure, and perhaps, too, his art. Scenes from a strip tease, a close-up of fishnet stockings, shots of transmission towers, a Kate Bush performance and other archival materials are dreamily edited together over a languid score. In a telling sequence, we watch a dolly shot down a grand hallway. A silhouetted figure steps into the frame and walks toward a brightly lit gallery at the end of the hall. Suddenly, the light changes, our eyes refocus, and the scene proves to be but a trick: a process shot filmed in the studio, with Leckey walking toward projected footage as though in search of a way into the images.

The teaser/trailer also features some of the LED screens and scintillating grids (custom-made lightboxes with photos) hanging in the show, their presence extending Leckey's found-memory memoir into the gallery. Potent and otherworldly, these light-emitting works move past mere techno-dazzle to transform their appropriations into apparitions. The LED screens each feature brief, looping animations in which the subject appears to hover at an eerie distance somewhere between the screen and the wall: Transfigured (2012) reanimates the legendary Hibiscus, founder of the '60s-era psychedelic theater troupe The Cockettes; in Transiting (2013), we watch clouds passing through a shaky shot of the moon. Leckey's grids are odder objects based on an optical illusion in which a grid of lights fools the eye into believing it's seeing spots. Techgnosis (2013) presents an illustrated image of an animal's eye that the artist has ripped along the white to reveal a pattern of small red, green and blue lights beneath it. In these works, vision is the subject, the object and the experience all at once.

An author's fate is often the final punctuation mark of a memoir—"what became of...?" Inside the exhibition's chronological collapse of cultural history, personal narrative and Leckey's present productions, the video Pearl Vision (2012) stands as another self-portrait of sorts, a glimmer of Leckey "now." Here, the chrome snare drum from Circa '87 takes center stage, a gleaming, near-perfect object onto which Leckey beats simple rhythms. We see Leckey reflected in the surface of the drum, at one moment wearing red trousers, at another wearing nothing at all. Through animation, the object also becomes an avatar; additional CG trickery makes it appear to pulse and breathe. Its metamorphoses are the achievements of our era—the hybridization of things and images dispossessed of their traditional boundaries by the digital world. Far from dystopian, Leckey's vision is one of pure pleasure; or, as we read in a close-up of the drum's label, NEXT LEVEL PERFECTION.

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